A review by bookph1le
Fat Talk: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture by Virginia Sole-Smith

5.0

This is such a good and sadly necessary book. Sole-Smith excels at taking complex issues and ideas and distilling them in an absorbing way that really makes you think. This book wasn't a fun read, but I found it very compelling and even though I've been deep in the work of divesting from diet culture for some time now, it made me think about a lot of things I hadn't really considered yet. I don't doubt, though, that this will mostly be a polarizing book. Readers like me, who see diet culture as toxic and are trying to untangle from it, will get a lot out of this, and that's good. What's not so good is that people who are invested in diet culture probably won't--and they're the ones who need it most. Of course, this is true of any structural bias. The only way to tear it down is to see it for what it is, but humans are tragically terrible as seeing structural bias clearly.

That probably sounds pessimistic, but I do have hope. I appreciate the many journalists, activists, and medical professionals doing this work, and I am hopeful that future generations will have a much healthier relationship with their bodies and with food and health than previous generations have.